Monthly Archives: May 2024

  • My Summer of Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pawel Pawlikowski (2004)

    A hot, sunny day, somewhere in rural Yorkshire; Mona (Natalie Press) lies in a field, dozing; Tamsin (Emily Blunt), passing by, speaks to her.  It’s the beginning of a social-opposites-attract friendship.  Mona rides a rarely functioning scooter, Tamsin her own horse.  She’s home, at her parents’ country pile, for the summer – home early, suspended from her boarding school for disruptive behaviour.  Mona lives with her elder brother, Phil (Paddy Considine), above the village pub owned by their late mother.  The pub’s name is the Swan; ditto the Saint-Saens piece that Tamsin practises, somewhat resentfully, on her cello.  While Phil was behind bars for petty theft and assault, he became a born-again Christian; now he’s getting rid of the pub’s alcohol so that the place can become a spiritual centre for him and his fellow believers in the neighbourhood.  This upsets his sister, who not only finds Phil’s religious awakening ridiculous but misses her mother.  Mona is currently in an entirely loveless sexual relationship, though not for much longer, with Ricky (Dean Andrews), decades older than her, a club singer of sorts.  She and Tamsin are drawn together by a combination of shared boredom and, as they soon discover, physical attraction.

    There’s a scene, quite early on in their friendship, where Tamsin has Mona try on different clothes, belonging to Tamsin and her sister, Sadie.  Trying things on is essential to Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love, which the director and Michael Wynne adapted from Helen Cross’s 2001 novel of the same name.  As the two girls sit on a wall outside a house, Tamsin explains, through angry tears, this is where her father (Paul-Anthony Barber) is having it off with his mistress.  In sympathetic response, Mona smashes a window in the car parked outside the house; she and Tamsin then run off together.  Tamsin is even more tearful when she tells Mona that Sadie died of anorexia nervosa.   We’ve no reason to disbelieve what Tamsin says about her family – her distress seems genuine – until she starts telling Mona about Edith Piaf:

    ‘She was this marvellous Parisian woman – and she had such a wonderful tragic life – and she was married three times – and each husband died in mysterious circumstances – and the last one was a boxing champion and she killed him with a fork – and she didn’t even go to prison because in France crimes of passion are forgiven …’

    Those in the audience with a bit of Piaf knowledge now get an idea of Tamsin’s appetite for embroidery and that she’s exploiting Mona’s relative ignorance – although Mona is also sometimes complicit in her friend’s inventions.  After Ricky dumps Mona, the girls turn up at his flat; Mona struggles to keep a straight face as Tamsin informs Ricky’s wife (Michelle Byrne) that Ricky got Mona pregnant and that she has been traumatised by an abortion.  When the wife gets angry and tells the pair to get lost, they oblige at speed.  In the annoying-the-grown-ups stakes, these incidents certainly beat ringing on someone’s doorbell before running away.  Later on, Tamsin and Mona discover magic mushrooms in Sadie’s bedroom, partake of them and turn up, under the influence, at a dance hall where Ricky’s singing.  They interrupt his set; their wobbly, amorous dancing disturbs that of the middle-aged-to-elderly patrons of the place.  These outbursts of bad behaviour work very well because what Tamsin and Mona do is, as well as irritating, funny – and funny largely because it evokes the viewer’s own memories of being stupidly childish.

    For her part, Mona tells Tamsin her real name is Lisa; when they were growing up, Phil accused her of always moaning – moaner-Lisa – and the joke name stuck.  There’s no knowing if this is actually true (though the new, serious-minded Phil calls his sister Mona); either way, it doesn’t have the potential ramifications of the stories told by Tamsin that deceive Mona.  As the bond between them strengthens, the girls drink, smoke, swim, kiss and have sex together.  They declare eternal love for each other and swear to a suicide pact should they ever be parted.  Tamsin buys Mona a new engine for her scooter, which they ride around on.  But when, once Phil eventually reverts to type and beats Mona up, she packs a suitcase and heads for Tamsin’s house, she discovers that her soulmate is preparing, under the supervision of her mother (Lynette Edwards), to return to boarding school.  Tamsin admits that she made up the stuff about her father and about Sadie (Kathryn Sumner), who now appears to reclaim the dress that Tamsin told Mona she could keep.

    The let’s-pretend theme extends to Phil’s spiritual rebirth.  In a rare visual set piece, Phil leads a ceremony to erect on a local hillside a huge cross that he has built.  (He’s accompanied by rather too many born-again acolytes than is credible in a small rural community but they do turn the ceremony into an even more weirdly impressive spectacle.)   This is in two ways the high point of Phil’s Christian life.  As he leads a prayer meeting, you hear beneath his apparently assured spiel a sense of urgency:  just keep talking and you can shut out the sound of the doubts in your head.  During another such meeting, Mona noisily fakes suicide; Phil, outside her bedroom door, begs to be let in and, in the next breath, begs God, ‘Don’t leave me, Lord’.  He does so, it seems, in all sincerity but he’s fighting a losing battle by now.  When he gets physically violent with Mona (who goads him by pretending to be possessed by a demon), Phil, in a stream of expletives, also evicts the other Christians from the premises.

    The trying it on may even extend to the girls’ sexual relationship.  I don’t mean to suggest the lesbianism is just-a-phase-they’re-going-through but, for Tamsin anyway, it’s in the nature of an experiment.  She finds Phil, as well as Mona, attractive, though she evidently despises him, too.  In one of My Summer of Love’s strongest scenes, Tamsin pretends – or half-pretends – to seduce Phil and, when she thinks she has succeeded, mocks him; she’s shocked as he then grasps her round the throat before dismissing her.   The love between them is a different matter for Mona – a matter of life and death.  Betrayed by Tamsin, she returns to the river where they’ve had happy times together, and Tamsin follows.  She derides Mona’s gullibility; Mona, appearing to accept this, invites Tamsin to join her in the river.  She grabs Tamsin and holds her head under the water (the image striking a fine balance between attempted murder and perverted baptism).  Mona eventually releases Tamsin, who gets her breath back enough to yell ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’  Mona makes no reply and walks off alone.

    All three main actors give remarkable performances.  This was Emily Blunt’s first cinema film (she’d already appeared on stage and television), made when she was just twenty.  As Tamsin, she’s thoroughly convincing as an entitled user; what’s most striking, though, because of the kind of screen performer she has turned out to be, is Blunt’s amazingly relaxed openness to the camera.  (She’s a consistently strong actress but such relaxation isn’t what you expect from her.)  Paddy Considine gives Phil an uncanny determined quietness that is sometimes affecting but chiefly disturbing.  I was watching the film for the first time twenty years after its original release:  at this distance in time, Natalie Press is bound to stand out partly because, unlike her two co-stars, she hasn’t had starring film roles since My Summer of Love but there’s more to it than that.  Press, who is Emily Blunt’s senior by a few years, makes it intriguingly hard to tell how old Mona is.  Whereas Tamsin is definitely a senior schoolgirl, Mona could be fifteen or she could be twenty-five – and this conveys effectively the aimlessness of her existence.  Pawel Pawlikowski and his cinematographer, Ryszard Lenczewski, do a fine job of capturing the summer beauty and the summer languor of the landscape.  The two men would work together again a decade later on Ida (2013), a film that won Pawlikowski the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  He received a second nomination in that category and a Best Director nomination for Cold War (2018).  For me, neither film is as good as My Summer of Love.

    16 May 2024

  • Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Hinton (2024)

    Still early days (18 reviews only) but this documentary currently has a 100% fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.  The summary for one of those positive reviews is pretty negative, though:  according to Adam Solomons on IndieWire, Made in England ‘ends up a stellar example of what in Britain would play on BBC Four:  polite, rarely profound, and packed with facts.  It’s unable to channel the essence of what made Powell and Pressburger’s films unforgettable.  Sadly, it’s not really trying’.  Happily, it doesn’t need to.  David Hinton’s film is replete with clips illustrating P&P’s visually and thematically imaginative cinema; rather than attempt to ‘channel the[ir] essence’, better to opt, as Hinton does, for straightforward, admiring exploration of their work.  And Made in England is formally more distinctive than the mildly disparaging reference to BBC Four arts documentaries suggests.  Unlike many of those, Hinton’s documentary features only three talking heads – Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Martin Scorsese.

    The Archers’ most famous fan, Scorsese has already put his money where his mouth is in overseeing restoration of some of their most celebrated pictures and he’s the on-screen narrator of Made in England.  The audience therefore has as guide someone who has also made unforgettable films (long ago now, alas), and he’s very engaging company.  Scorsese has complete command of the subject but wears his knowledge lightly.  The narration is indeed ‘packed with facts’ but Scorsese’s verbal style is relaxed – speaking direct to camera, he makes his monologue feel like a conversation with us.  He tells us plenty about himself.  Along with Francis Ford Coppola and other illustrious contemporaries, Scorsese, whose childhood asthma meant that he spent plenty of time indoors, grew up on a rich diet of transatlantic film fare:  when early post-war Hollywood was refusing to license its pictures to US television, the humbler British film industry was happy to oblige.  It’s amusing to learn that Scorsese first got into the cinema of Powell and Pressburger, renowned for its physical scale and extraordinary colouring, watching his family’s small black-and-white TV at home in the Bronx.  He explains, it seems effortlessly, why he loves the Archers’ work, what they’ve meant to him both as a film-maker and in his life outside film shoots.  He several times shows, in juxtaposing clips from one of their films and one of his own, how the former influenced the latter.  (For example, he was inspired by camerawork that he felt somehow went inside the head of Victoria Page when she danced in The Red Shoes, to try something similar in Raging Bull during Jake La Motta’s fights.)  In making these links, Scorsese isn’t egotistical.  He makes clear his debt to Michael Powell and never implies that he surpassed him.

    Scorsese’s major involvement in Made in England (he’s also an executive producer) makes it inevitable that Powell will, as usual, come across as the dominant figure in the P&P partnership.  In footage from an interview with the two men together when both were in their eighties, Pressburger succinctly summarises their respective contributions – he wrote, Powell directed and ‘we produced together’.  (Powell, off camera, can be heard murmuring assent to this.)  It’s intrinsically more difficult, of course, to realise a writer’s contribution on screen, compared with a director’s:  even when we hear Pressburger’s lines, they’re mediated through actors being directed by Powell.  Besides, it was with Powell rather than Pressburger that Scorsese, in the mid-1970s, formed an enduring personal friendship.  (Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every Scorsese feature since Raging Bull in 1980, is another of Made in England’s executive producers.)  Just as their film-making roles were defined, so Powell and Pressburger developed distinct attitudes towards the studio heads that held the purse-strings for their collaborations – notably Alexander Korda, J Arthur Rank and David O Selznick.  Scorsese describes P&P as ‘experimental film-makers working within the system’; the creative constraints of doing so were, for Powell rather than Pressburger, increasingly intolerable.  (Powell refused to work with Rank again in light of the latter’s lack of enthusiasm for The Red Shoes and the studio’s consequently half-hearted promotion of the film.)  The narrative describes well how the Archers grew apart and, more in sorrow than in anger, went their separate ways, after Ill Met by Moonlight (1957).

    The narrative doesn’t, though, make clear that they reunited for late-career curiosities, They’re a Weird Mob and The Boy Who Turned Yellow (which aren’t mentioned at all) – and there are more frustrating omissions.  Powell pays tribute to the genius of production designer Alfred Junge but it would have been good to hear more about other key members of the P&P team.  Scorsese is oddly inconsistent in naming actors:  Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook feature in several clips but aren’t acknowledged – unlike not only the big star names (Deborah Kerr, David Niven) but also, say, Kathleen Byron and David Farrar.  Scorsese’s references to ‘the English culture and spirit’ that he thinks are captured in the Archers’ films, are vague but it’s hard to mind.  His vast knowledge of, and real love for, their work is infectious, even when you disagree with his estimation of particular pictures (overrating The Red Shoes and Gone to Earth, underrating Ill Met by Moonlight).  David Hinton, whose previous work as a documentary director includes a 1986 South Bank Show profile of Powell (clips from it included here), takes a back seat to Scorsese, as well as to Powell and Pressburger, but does an unobtrusively good job.  His title is probably a nod to English-culture-and-spirit thinking yet it seems right enough – never mind that Emeric Pressburger was born and educated in Hungary or that Michael Powell supposedly loved Scotland even more than his native Kent.  Hinton’s film is thoroughly enjoyable.  The emotional power of plenty of the excerpts – from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going!, especially – is something else.

    16 May 2024

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